My Guitar Playing Journey So Far

My first experience of learning guitar was when I was at primary school. I can’t remember how old I was, I must have been around 8 or 10.

Guitar Lessons at Primary School

The school sent a message around saying that a guitar teacher was starting at the school, and the kids could take lessons on a Tuesday lunchtime or something like that.

So, my parents paid for the lessons, and my grandparents bought my sister and I (she started lessons too) some 3/4 size acoustics from the local catalogue store.

The classes has 5-6 of us in there at once. We learned the names of the open strings, and some basic chords (I think).

I even wrote my first song – 2 minutes of random open strings! I remember feeling pretty pleased with myself at the time.

Unfortunately, the teacher quit after a few weeks (maybe she didn’t like my song?), which annoyed the parents who had gone and paid for instruments for their kids.

Practice ended quickly, and the guitar went mostly untouched for a few years.

My first guitar that my grandparents bought for me while I was at primary school

Learning Drums

Fast forwards a few years, and my mum has a job as a PA at to the head of music at the local university. Some of the music students were looking for a way to make an extra few quid and asked if her children (i.e. me) wanted drum lessons.

Now I didn’t have a drum kit. So I would walk to the local university on a Saturday afternoon and take drum lessons with a drummer, using his kit.

It was fun and I did that for a month or two. I remember his band were doing a rehearsal after my lesson and I ended up jamming with them for a few minutes once or twice, which was pretty cool.

I think the drummer gave the bass player in the band the idea of teaching bass to make some extra cash, and the idea backfired on him when I quit doing drum lessons and did bass for a few weeks.

Again, I didn’t have a bass, so this guy would come round with his bass at the weekend and teach me for 30 minutes of whatever it was.

And… I couldn’t practice between lessons.

I was enjoying the lessons, but I didn’t feel particularly inspired by them.

Anyway, I remember the next part vividly. I was visiting my grandfather with my Dad one weekend, and my Dad was asking me how the lessons were going. I told him they were going ok, and he said something along the lines of:

“Why are you learning bass? Don’t you want to learn lead guitar, I thought that was the cool member of a band?”

Well… I thought for a moment. And agreed with him, lead guitar was cool.

So, I go back to my mum’s that evening (my parents had divorced at this point) and we talk, and I switch from bass to guitar lessons. My mum found me a teacher pretty quickly (a guy called Adam) and we got started.

Lessons with Adam

We started out with basic chords, scales and technical exercises. I learned my open chords, barre chords and all 5 positions of the minor pentatonic scale with him.

He bravely spent two months helping me play “All Day and All of the Night” by The Kinks (I really sucked at that song).

He also introduced me to bands and players like Joe Satriani, Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai.

I remember hearing Joe Satriani’s “Surfing with the Alien” for the first time and having my jaw literally drop. I couldn’t believe anyone could play a guitar like that!! It was so cool.

When I heard Yngiwe Malmsteen’s album “Facing the Animal”, I was astounded at what could be done on an electric guitar.

It was the start of a decade long obsession with speed and technique in my guitar playing.

Now, up until this point, I didn’t really listen to music. My family didn’t really listen to music very much. I was having a pretty tough time at school and just wanted to ‘fit in’, and would listen to music that the other kids said they listened to, which was dance music on Kiss FM.

The music sucked. But I didn’t know that any other music was really out there – until Adam introduced me to Satriani and Yngwie, which started a very quick dive into heavy metal.

Discovering a World of Metal

I was taking lessons with Adam for several years. He was a really cool guy.

I started listening to metal a lot more. I found a few friends that were just getting into metal, and together we started obsessively finding more and more new bands to listen to.

I think that is probably one of the most exciting stages of being a heavy metal fan, when you are brand new to the genre and there are 100s of bands for you to discover and listen to.

We would spend our lunchtimes at school sharing the bands we had found and listening to new ones.

We started going to gigs together, mainly power metal gigs in London. The very first gig I went to was Threshold, with Balance of Power and Power Quest; who were playing at the Underworld in London.

Then my friends and I got really, really into Dragonforce. They had released Valley of the Dammed and Sonic Firestorm was fresh on the scene, and we would go see them play in London.

We saw them several times, and for a while a few of us were really active on Dragonforce’s online forum.

Like (at least what seems to me) a large amount of metal fans, my friends and I wanted to start a band, so that is what we did:

The First Band

As I slowly improved at my guitar playing, it turned out that a few of my other friends at school were also learning instruments, and we got together and formed a band.

We put some adverts online, and somehow found a singer. The singer would travel from Wimbledon to Uxbridge for our band rehearsals.

There were some local rehearsal studios in Uxbridge that we used and we would go there once a week. We would write our own songs and hack our way through them.

The quality of the music was… debatable.

But we really enjoyed it. It was the coolest thing ever.

In fact, one of my favourite experiences in life to this day, is that feeling of playing heavy metal with others.

It’s just awesome.

We had a myspace page and a little website and everything. We gave the myspace page an Egyptian feel, spelling the band name in hieroglyphics (I was totally into Ancient Egypt at the time).

We played together for a year or so, and then someone we knew was at music college. They had a project where they had to record a band, so we took a day off school and went to their college to record a few songs.

In the end, they said we played so badly, that they deleted all the files. For sure we didn’t play great, but it would have been nice to have at least heard them!!

A few months go by, and eventually we got the kid at school who did the sound for the school assemblies to record us. We booked the drama studio for a day, made a monumental amount of noise, and somehow recorded 4 songs for a CD.

It was crazy fun. The CD wasn’t very good!!

I don’t think we ever played a show, but we had a lot of fun in that band.

After that band, I finished school and went to university.

Heavy Metal Adventures at University

University was a lot of fun.

I went to the University of York to get a 4 year masters degree in astrophysics.

I moved into the university halls (which were a big shared accommodation) and by chance, the guy living on the floor above me was a drummer (and since became one of my best friends).

At the start of university, there was a big event called “Freshers Fair”, which is where all the university societies have a stall and you can go around finding which societies you want to join.

So my new friend and I went there, and found something called The Band Society (shortened to BandSoc). We join, and goto their jam night, which was conveniently 10 metres walk from our halls.

It was my first time playing live properly. The idea for the jam night is everyone has some beers and jams some riffs on stage with each other.

I jammed on stage with my new drummer friend and another guitar player who also happened to be called Sam. He’s a cool guy and has done a couple of albums, we still talk from time to time.

I remember being so nervous that I had my back turned to the (limited) audience for the entire jam!

Nerve wracking, but a lot of fun.

Afterwards I went to the bar and grabbed a beer, then started talk to the guy who organised the event, who invited myself and the drummer to join his band.

And we did!

My Second Band

We did some fun things in that band. We started learning the songs and rehearsing pretty soon, and after a few months of rehearsing, it was time for the first gig.

The university battle of the bands.

We practised a lot for this.

There were quite a lot of people there (at least, it felt like it!) it was a big event on the university social calendar.

We played ok. I remember being so nervous on stage that my legs were shaking and I could barely use my effects pedals.

But, it was a lot of fun.

The First Summer After Uni

That first summer after uni I went back home for the summer. At the time, I was still fairly active on the Dragonforce forum and was posting on the Bloodstock open Air forums (Bloodstock is one of the best European heavy metal festivals).

There was a guy (Graeme) on there advertising for a band who lived nearby, so I replied and met up with him and the other guys in the band he was putting together.

I can’t quite remember the timeline for this. He is a year younger than me, and was finishing school before leaving for university.

He was getting a few guys together to play a show at his school’s leaving concert / event / thing, and we were playing You Give Love a Bad Name by Bon Jovi; and something else.

I remember the gig going ok, it was a lot of fun… and I think the singer forgot the lyrics for the second verse or something.

Either way, that guy and I ended up playing in various bands for a few years to come.

A photo from that gig at Graeme’s school. I saw Joe Satriani do this on the G3 Denver DVD and was desperate to copy it!

Playing Across the North of the UK

After that summer, it was back to university and my university band.

We started playing a few shows in small bars and clubs around York. The band had a bit of a cult following and people would come watch us and support, which was really cool.

I had friends in Newcastle and G went to university in Lancaster, and we played some gigs there, which were pretty fun.

There is a pub in Lancaster called The Bobbin which had some great underground heavy metal bands playing, and was the home venue of the traditional heavy metal band Eliminator for a while .

We played at The Bobbin a couple of times, one time driving from York to Lancaster and back in a day, which was a brutal trip – we got home at 4am or something ridiculous.

For that gig we took a two car convoy, with myself and the drummer in one car and the rest of the band in the other.

The drummer and were sharing a house at the time, and I remember we pulled up in the street at 4am or so, unloaded all our gear into the living room of the house, and passed out.

A gig that old university band played in York. The mighty Marshall rack behind me has been with me ever since!

Making an EP

After playing for a few years, and with a few lineup changes, the band eventually got organised enough to record a 4 track EP.

I think everything was home recorded and we started selling the EP for £1 at shows we played.

Making it was fun and challenging, but it was an amateur production.

We used “light scribe” discs, which were pretty cool. The idea was that you could use a special CD burner to draw a picture on top of the CD.

The quality came out pretty good and it meant we could get cheap, clear, slim plastic CD cases, and just had a CD. No cover art required!

It was a lot of fun. We sold out the first run and made a second. It was great to play a show and then go selling our CDs in the audience afterwards.

Learning Guitar While at University

When I went to university, I stopped studying with a teacher, but I still had my quest for speed. I started using books, DVDs and even comic books on my quest to become a shredder.

One of the best resources I found was John Petrucci’s Rock Discipline. That was a cool book and had some great exercises to work on.

A big mistake I made here was trying to teach myself. I should have stopped drinking beer and instead used the money to study with a great teacher, but hey, 20/20 hindsight!

The comic book I used, which promised to teach the secrets of shred guitar, was a great read, but not very useful.

It made the classic teaching error of “You become a great guitar player by playing these tabs for 30 hours a day”, rather than training the student on the motions their hands need to make AND giving them the tabs to train those motions on.

I read about Steve Vai’s practice regime and started trying to do insane amounts of practice myself, aiming to practice for 3-6 hours a day during the summer.

The Second EP

Towards the end of the university the band got ready to record a 2nd EP. We had written some more songs, but, we were not very organised.

One of the things I learned from being in bands, was that every band needs a strong leader, or it is not going to get anywhere.

Our band (and several afterwards) was not well organised. When it came to committing and pushing to achieve something, it was difficult to get things done.

There was a local recording studio, and the drummer and I went in and recorded our parts (paying out for it), but the rest of the band never got around to recording their parts, which was pretty annoying.

Maybe it was just swell, as this chapter was coming to a close.

Music College

Eventually, I graduated university with a masters in astrophysics, and it was time to figure out what I wanted to do next.

The university physics department had a big jobs exhibition that I looked around. There were some cool looking jobs in defence research that were tempting, but the idea of playing guitar… it was just more fun.

So after university, I ended up going to music college in Bristol for a year.

I remember being there the first week. I was really excited to start. I gave myself a challenging practice regime.

And 3 days into the term, I went and damaged a tendon in my arm from practising too much.

Well, not so much practising too much, as not practising properly, not paying attention to proper tension control and technique (which I had no idea about) and ignoring the warning signs, mistakingly thinking that I could “play through the pain”.

To say I felt frustrated, was a complete understatement.

I wanted to practice, to work, and I couldn’t.

I couldn’t practice guitar, so I thought I would work on my theory. I bought a copy of Gradus Ad Parnassum from Amazon and started working through it.

While working on that, I was trying to find a solution for my arm, so that I could play guitar again.

I saw several different specialists. One wanted to inject steroids into my elbow. Another suggested surgery.

Neither seemed like a good solution to me, so I kept looking.

Eventually I found a physiotherapist. After a few weeks of physiotherapy, my arm was healing and starting to work again, and I could play guitar for 20 minutes or so a day, very slowly building it up.

Which was great!!

I could practice a little bit, and took the sight reading exam at the end of that first term, passing it with a good grade – I was feeling happy!

Over the brief holiday after that term, I started working a bar job. I knew a guy from the Bloodstock forum who hooked me up working at the Bierkeller in Bristol. It was fun and the people were good to work with, but the late nights were pretty punishing.

But, it meant I could feed myself. I had saved enough of my student loan from university to cover the rent.

My arm was better and I could get playing again!

I built my practice routine up and caught up on the playing that I had missed out on. I was practising a LOT every day, which was great – this was exactly what I wanted!

At the end of each term, everyone did a performance.

At the end of my second term, I did “Great Tinted Sixties Mind” by Mr Big, and completely butchered it. I was failed and had to redo the piece, and the second time I barely passed.

At the end of the third term, I did “Always With Me, Always With You” by Joe Satriani, which wasn’t great, but I got passed first time, which was good enough.

I had an obsession with challenging myself to the limit. I could have done an easier piece, like a Nirvana song or something… but the thought of doing something easy and getting a good grade, against pushing myself and getting a mediocre grade…

I’d push myself every time I could. I wasn’t there for a grade, I was there to improve, and if that meant a bad grade or the occasional fail, so be it.

Eventually, music college finishes and I move back home to London, figuring out what to do with my life.

Playing Always With Me, Always With You, at my music college final performance

Joining Bands After Music College

I had the idea of making money by teaching guitar, but after moving home had no-one to teach. So, I started taking on any odd job I could find. Bar work, manual labour, anything.

I even had a job that was shovelling rocks. Yup, several hours of shovelling rocks.

G had moved back home after finishing university at Lancaster, so I played in his black metal band for a while. It was pretty fun, but didn’t last.

I started looking for other bands to join, and joined a power metal band for a while. They were pretty good, but I didn’t quite have the skills to keep up and got fired. Their other guitar player was from somewhere in Asia and his visa ran out and got deported… I don’t think the band lasted long.

I then spent several months searching for bands. I went to auditions, got offered a few spots but nothing really seemed right, so I didn’t join any of those bands.

Eventually I found one guy advertising on Gumtree and joined that band. He had written some songs and was looking for people to join his band to play them. I got on really well with him, like the music and joined.

I would goto his place to learn the riffs, we kept searching for other people to join, and eventually we had a full line up. Rehearsals started and we started looking for our first gigs.

Studying Guitar Online

It was about this time that I started studying online with a guitar teacher. The lessons were pretty good and it was the first time someone had explained to me how to move my hands, rather than just give me tabs, so I started studying intensely.

There was also an option to take an online course written by Luca Turilli which I started, and I started making progress.

The combination of studying with two teachers was very powerful, and within a year I had reached the level of playing that I had always wanted to – I could shred.

I managed to hit 16 notes per second. Which is a pretty serious level of speed by any standard.

Pleased with the results I had achieved from the online guitar lessons, I started taking other programs offered by this teacher and getting sucked into something pretty dark, which I’ll come back to later.

Getting Fired (Again)

So this band I was playing with in London had been found a full line up and been rehearsing and it was time to start doing some shows.

We played a handful of shows, and they went really well. I was getting great feedback from the audience on my playing, which felt great. I remember after the second gig, the singers girlfriend came up to me to say how awesome I had played and that she wanted to see every show I played afterwards hah!

We took some of the songs we had done, hired a recording studio and recorded a 4 song EP. That was a pretty fun experience.

While I could shred, my playing did have weak areas. I could belt out a disgusting amount of notes, but I had no note ornamentation. I couldn’t use bends properly, and when I did they were out of tune and poorly placed.

I was making some contributions to songwriting, and had started putting a few riffs together, but I couldn’t write a whole song of my own at this point.

Through someone I knew (again from the Bloodstock Forum), one day an opportunity came my way.

There was a touring metal band playing in London, and their support band had, for whatever reason, bailed on the show last minute. The promoter was desperate to find a band to fill the slow, my friend knew the promoter, and long story short, if I wanted it we could have played.

A support slot for a sold out show… this seemed like a dream come true.

Unfortunately the band disagreed. They didn’t want to take a day off work. They didn’t think they were ready.

They were scared.

I pushed and argued to try and convince people to take a chance, that this show could get us some real exposure, but they just did not want to do it.

They wanted to tell girls they played in a band, they didn’t want to play in a band.

I started looking for other bands, and kept studying with my teacher online.

I went to a few auditions, but nothing really came of it.

In my internet perusals, one day I came across an advert for something called Vai Academy in America.

Steve Vai was doing a week long guitar event, and it looked awesome. I had loved Vai’s playing ever since Adam had introduced his music to me at my early guitar lessons.

So I had to figure out if I could do. I was still living at home at that point, and I had been slowly and steadily growing my teaching business, having about 20 students or so by this point.

I figured if I took the payment plan, I could just about manage to do it.

So, after staring at the sign up screen for an hour… I did it.

And a few months later I was on a plane to America.

The trip was pretty crazy and I talk about it here.

But it was totally worth it. I had a great time out there and got to play on stage with Steve Vai, which was totally awesome.

It was an experience I will never forget, and one I cannot wait to recreate… this time playing my own songs, supporting him.

It will happen.

A Baroque Love Affair

After being fired from the band I had enjoyed playing in so much, I felt a bit aimless for a few months.

I was wondering what to do, so started looking for bands to join again, without much success.

Then one day, I was driving with a friend, and were listening to classical FM. The radio station was playing Prelude from Bach’s 1st Cello Suite.

I remembered thinking to myself… I wonder if I can play that on guitar?

And that took me down a very long road very quickly!

I found other baroque bits and pieces I wanted to cover. The first I released was a video of a Handel piece, where I played the two violin parts as two guitar parts.

It was pretty cool, but I used a big distortion and I didn’t play it as well as I could have (it will be redone sometime soon!). It got a few views on YouTube and eventually I took it down.

I got heavily into transcribing and learning the entirety of Bach’s 1st Cello Suite on Electric Guitar. I would set an alarm in the morning, wake up early, and put an hour or two into it, first thing every morning.

I knew of an artist called The Commander in Chief who had done a lot of classical crossover work. I emailed her manager and booked a masterclass for a day or so, to have their help working on the piece.

I also found a local classical cellist called Jacqueline Philips, who did some pretty high level orchestral work, and took classes with her to help me get a classical on playing the pieces.

If you listen to most electric guitar covers of Bach’s Cello Suite you hear straight 16th notes – classical cellists play it very differently, and that’s what I wanted to learn.

Eventually, after working and working on the piece, I wanted to record it.

I was doing some googling and found MTR Studios in West London. It was run by a guy called Phil Kinman who had built the band New Device in it’s early days.

I sent Phil an email, asking a very specific question:

Would he push me harder than I could push myself to get the be possible recording?

He replied saying that he would, and that was that. I booked 3 days in the studio, and recoded Bach’s 1st Cello Suite on Electric Guitar.

I released it as an EP, it was only about 15 minutes long, on CD, with a tab book that people could buy.

It was a cool product to release and is still available on my online store. But, selling a couple a month at the most wasn’t groundbreaking… but it did feel pretty good to finally have my own CD and my first book published!

While working on the baroque EP, I had also been writing some heavy metal songs.

Work was slow, because I was figuring out how to write songs.

After the last time I got fired, I realised that I had to learn how to write my own songs. I couldn’t rely on other people writing songs for me.

If I wanted to make heavy metal records, and go on tours playing at metal venues all over the world with other heavy metal bands, I had to be able to write great heavy metal songs.

It was slow work.

A lot of trial and error.

Over the course of three years, I slowly figured it out. How to write songs, and write lyrics.

I hired a drummer I knew from the music college I attended to to play drums on the record. The dude was a monster, and recorded all the drums in a single day.

He was a professional session drummer and now plays drums for Bullet for my Valentine. His name is Jason Bowld. Total badass.

A year after recording the drums, I went back to MTR studios in West London, where I had recorded the baroque album, Bach’s1 1st Cello Suite on Electric Guitar, a year or so earlier.

I booked the studio for a week, lugged my amp down and recorded all the guitar parts and bass parts for the album.

It was a *lot* of fun.

It really was one of the pivotal moments for me as a musician…. hearing this album that I had put so much work into for so long, slowly coming to life.

However, I had no singer, and I sure as hell wasn’t singing on the album.

The original idea I had was to contact a load of rockstars, hire them to sing on the album, and use their name to get famous, sell loads of records, and live out my days writing metal albums and playing guitar.

It was a cool idea, but it didn’t quite work out that way… but I’ll get to that later.

Phil recommended that we record some demo vocals on the songs, so that the singers I try to hire would know exactly how the song went. It was a pretty sound strategy and I was grateful for his advice, having not done anything in the professional world of music.

Phil knew the singer form New Device, a guy called Dan Leigh. We talked and he came down to the studio for a day to belt out some demo vocals. He did a great job… but it brought to light that my lyric writing was still quite weak in a lot of areas.

Anyway, with complete demos in place, I started emailing rockstars… and seeing if anyone would bite.

I got one rejection (they liked the music but were too busy), one person ignored me, and one day, a reply from some German guy turned up in my email.

I’d sent Doro’s manager the studio demo of the song Leigh Wood from Impetuous Desire… and they liked it.

Doro was in the songwriting process for Forever Warriors and originally, her and her manager were considering having the song Leigh Woods on the album.

Due to various reasons, they decided against it, but still wanted to record the song, so I ended up on a flight to Germany to record the song with Doro and her manager in a studio over there.

It was… well it was awesome. By far one of the coolest things I have ever done.

I remember sitting in the studio and wondering… could my life be like this… all the time?

It was everything I had dreamed of doing. Working in the big studio with amazing musicians.

Doro was by far the nicest person I have ever met, and you can read more on that story here. Everyone in the metal scene who has met her says the same thing – how awesome she is.

Hanging out with Doro in Germany

Finishing and Releasing Impetuous Desire

With Doro’s song in the bag, it was time to finish the rest of Impetuous Desire.

I hired Dan Leigh again to finish the vocals. Together, we rewrote new top lines for a lot of the songs, and I rewrote a ton of lyrics. Then he wrote backing vocals on top of that.

It was a lot of work, and we both worked quite intensely over 3 weeks or so to get all the writing finished, before going back into the studio for 3 days to record all the vocals.

After that, Phil got to work on mixing and mastering the record.

I had been in Chicago in the US a month or so before (and had the worst flight I have ever taken in my life) for an event with my online guitar teacher, and flew out a few days early to LA to do a photoshoot with Orangutang for the album cover. Mike and Christina were really cool to work with.

I also wanted the album booklet to be a piece of art, so I hired Helen Hebenton from Uncanny Designs to do a piece of art for each song. I really liked her style. I had seen her art on Facebook and really liked her use of colour, so that was an easy decision.

And before I knew it, everything had come together. The artwork was complete, the photos were done, and the music had been recorded, mixed and mastered.

Impetuous Desire had been completed.

Recording a second baroque album

I wasn’t really sure how to promote a heavy metal album, but I had a burning itch (maybe I should get that seen to…?) to do some more baroque recording, so I started working on Bach’s 2nd Cello Suite.

I had already transcribed all 6 cello suites for electric guitar, so fortunately I didn’t have to go through the process of transcribing it, I could just sit down and learn it.

After I had memorised the piece, I got back in contact with Jacqueline for some more lessons to get a feel for the piece, and then it was back into the studio.

We recorded it in two days.

Playing Bach in London

I thought it would be cool to play the baroque stuff I had learned so far live, so while I was in America that year, one of my students acted as my “booking agent” and phoned a bunch of churches in London.

We put together a few dates and I was booked to play several lunchtime concerts of Bach’s 1st and 2nd Cello Suites around the capital, which was pretty cool.

What wasn’t cool, was that I found my old nemesis of stage fright returning. I found my muscles feeling tense while I performed and I nitpicked over every little mistake I played.

People came up to me afterwards to say they enjoyed it, but the only thing I could think about was the mistakes I had made.

I actually found the whole thing really stressful and got me thinking about how I perform best.

Some of my favourite performances were always with other musicians, rather than playing solo.

Quitting My Teacher’s Programs

While I had been progressing on my guitar playing journey, I found myself getting sucked deeper and deeper into what I thought at the time, was my mentor’s, programs.

I was being told that it was the key to attaining my goals. In actual fact, I was being told what my goals should be… and then sold the key to those goals.

When I stopped and thought, I found that I had been reaching some of my goals, while being lead farther and farther from others.

A few people who have left actually called it a cult. I’m not sure I would call it a cult, but it does have some undeniably cult like characteristics.

I found myself being pushed down a path I did not want to go down.

I was gaslighted and lied to.

When I left I felt incredibly isolated and alone.

It was incredibly frustrating. There was some really good stuff, I had learned a lot and improved my guitar playing, but every positive seemed to come with a negative.

Every truth was wrapped in a lie.

As scary as it felt at the time, I eventually reached the conclusion that being part of that group had given me some benefits, but was not going to help me any more, and would actually do everything it could to prevent me getting the life I wanted, so I left.

The Next Chapter

It’s been a bumpy ride.

I’ve learned a lot.

I’ve improved a lot.

I can only think… what’s next?

I’m working on a second heavy metal album. There are a few classical things that I want to do, but I will do them as singles and occasional tracks here and there, rather than doing a whole album of classical stuff (well, unless the classical stuff really takes off, then I might go with it).

I’ve found some new guitar players I want to study with.

I’ve got a short list of guests for the next album.

I’m sure the future is only going to hold better and more interesting and fun things for me… provided I put in the work for it.

No, I quit a few years ago. I give credit to the man for his teaching expertise. But he’s not someone you can trust on a personal level. If you’re wise enough then I believe you’d definitely get the benefits from his teaching. Otherwise you’ll end up like the other thousands who remain for no clear reason.